Literary Tattoo Ideas: Poem Tattoos

The first poem I ever wrote, at the tender age of nine, was about a man and a woman standing in the darkness of their living room late at night, unable to sleep for reasons unknown, and the final sentence went something like: Look at them, their faces mild, for in her arms, there sleeps a child. I had woken up in the middle of the night that evening, with that final sentence implanted in my brain, and for the first time in my life I reached into my nightstand in the darkness, found a pencil and a piece of paper, scribbled down the words and crafted a poem around it. I remember it being pretty impressive for a nine-year old. So impressive, in fact, that when I rushed to show it to my mom in the morning she looked at me weird and asked, "Did you really write this?" I love poetry because it can be so powerfully evocative in just a few short lines, whether it rhymes or just has it's own natural flow.Among people who choose to get an entire poem, or an excerpt from a poem, tattooed on their skin, there are certain classics that seem to be particularly favored.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923)

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep

ROBERT FROST Tattoos

Robert Frost was an American poet and playwright from New England who is best known for works such as Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Road Not Taken, Nothing Gold Can Stay and Fire and Ice. Between the sale of his first poem, My Butterfly: An Elegy in 1894, and his death at age 88 in 1963, he won four Pulitzer Prize awards for poetry and was honored to be chosen to read one of his poems at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961. The epitaph on his headstone, located in Old Bennington Cemetery in Vermont, quotes a line from one of his poems: "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."